“Collaborative Neural Rendering Using Anime Character Sheets”, Zuzeng Lin, Ailin Huang, Zhewei Huang, Chen Hu, Shuchang Zhou2022-07-12 (Danbooru AI)⁠:

Drawing images of characters at desired poses is an essential but laborious task in anime production.

In this paper, we present the Collaborative Neural Rendering (~CoNR) method to create new images from a few arbitrarily posed reference images available in character sheets. In general, the high diversity of body shapes of anime characters defies the employment of universal body models for real-world humans, like SMPL. To overcome this difficulty, CoNR uses a compact and easy-to-obtain landmark encoding to avoid creating a unified UV mapping in the pipeline.

In addition, CoNR’s performance can be increased when having multiple reference images by using feature space cross-view dense correspondence and warping in a specially designed neural network construct.

Moreover, we collect a character sheet dataset containing over 700,000 hand-drawn and synthesized images of diverse poses to facilitate research in this area.